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pâte brisée

“This is Allysa’s friend Jill Rowe’s favorite apple pie recipe. It was the most popular dessert that she made when she owned and ran a local restaurant, The Kitchen, near Allysa’s home in upstate New York.”

I have made this pie (sort of) twice with a detour each time and lots of compliments

First: I continue to make butter-based, French style pâte brisée. It is simply the kind of pie/tart crust I want to perfect without looking right or left. That said, there are a number of tweaked pâte brisée recipes out there. I check out Julia Child’s recipe but decided against it – it uses lard of which I have none but, again, in which I am not interested. I chose a recipe on Martha Stewart’s website that is EASY and what I’m looking for.

Second: I have decided to add nuts – walnuts once, and pecans another time. This too is something I intend to stick with and even raise to the level (if I dare be so bold) of “signature” recipe – one of a few recipes I’m beginning to think of as “signature” from my oven. Of the two pies, the one with the toasted pecans in it made people go “ooh-là-là”.

One might experiment with chunks or slices of apples plus the quantity of nuts.

So, this detour calls for at least

1 cup of roughly chopped toasted pecans mixed in to the apple/sugar mix. I may add more in the future as I am looking for a sturdy, nutty, apple mix for what I’ll call a tart.

Beautiful but …. I need to learn how to bring the top and bottom together without the folded seam.

I didn’t get a picture of a slice of this. Below is something similar from “Sarah Cooks”.

This post was supposed to be about Magnolia’s Srawberry Double-Crust Pie, but I was in such a mood for France, and the whole “tart” tradition, that I just couldn’t bring myself to make an American style pie. I ended borrowing from here and there to create the desert of the title and pictured below. I’ll explain:

The cream cheese filling comes from the Cream Cheese Pecan Pie. But I added two tablespoons of the black currant liquer, Crème de Cassis, plus 1/4 cup of black currant jam. The double-crust pie has no cream cheese filling,